Removing the gloss from the 'retro wife'

The "retro wife" trend is a fiction that fails to recognise why it is that mothers often choose to stay at home with their children, writes Amy Gray.

"Feminism has fizzled, its promise only half-fulfilled."

It's a rather provocative statement that sits at the core of New York magazine's latest cover story, "The Retro Wife" by Lisa Miller.

According to Miller, there is a new trend of women embracing the retro wife archetype because they believe women are better parents and because the labour involved in working and raising a family is too hard to manage.

In "The Retro Wife", Miller profiles three women who backed away from careers in favour of "domestic reign" where they look after children and husbands.

The article contradicts modern commentary about women balancing work and family life. Instead of embracing the benefits of women working, it presents women who walk away from careers and claims it is a new feminist choice. "They don't want a return to the confines of the fifties; they treasure their freedoms, but see a third way," writes Miller.

Throughout her article, Miller portrays these women as reacting critically against current feminist expectations and embracing gender differences. One of the mothers believes the simple fact of being female and playing with dolls as a child gives her "a better toolbox" to parent than her husband, while another is relieved that "my husband and I have fallen into traditional gender roles without conflict".

Reaction to the article has been predictably dramatic and has been criticised for relying on ideologically-driven studies, gender essentialism (the notion that men and women think, act and socialise differently thanks to biology) and inaccuracy.

Kelly Makino, mother of two, was interviewed and posed as the baking and babe-bearing beauty cover model for the article. In the piece, Makino says she loves spoiling her husband with massages, and claims their lives are more rewarding without her working.

Tellingly, Makino says that now that she's not focused on her job, she and her husband have more fun and more sex - positioning her as the sole means of providing happiness in the family, rather than an equal when negotiating enjoyment, chores and tasks in a shared household.

Miller also presents author and blogger Rebecca Woolf as a glossy, idealised homemaker who publishes envy-inducing photos of perfected domestication.

Woolf's actual body of work explores working life, gender, feminism ... and having a nanny so she can work. Makino claims to have been interviewed under a different pretence - as an expert voice that related to her job as a manager for press relations (she was also formerly a social worker). Rather than believing mothers are superior parents, she says, "I vehemently support men in the role of primary caregiver".

But the bigger fault with this article is what it doesn't tell us about women's lives and the factors that determine the choices made. Women still work longer hours than men in the home, pay for increasingly expensive childcare, are often without the support of flexible working conditions, and potentially miss out on career opportunities.

Locally, women tend to participate more in the workforce as their children grow older. The Australian Bureau of Statistics reports that 51 per cent of employed mothers with children aged 0-4 years in coupled families work full time (this percentage has not changed from 2003-2010). This full-time employment rate rises to 81 per cent once children reach 15 years or older.

When it comes to domestic work, the ABS states, "In 2006, mums of school-aged children on average spent 5 hours and 9 minutes a day caring for their children, while mums of younger children spent 11 hours and 25 minutes. Those mums employed part-time spent almost 2 hours more per day looking after their children (8 hours and 34 minutes) compared to mums who worked full-time (6 hours and 39 minutes per day)."

Complaints of misrepresentation notwithstanding, Miller completely misses the real challenge confronting women. If there is any shift by women toward the domestic sphere, it's not due to some desire to embrace feminist domesticity - it's more likely due to the high cost of childcare.

In the US, the UK, Australia and around the world, childcare case costs are skyrocketing. According to OECD data, childcare can absorb up to 50 per cent of family income in Switzerland. Childcare costs taking 23.1 per cent of US and 14.5 per cent of Australian income feels more manageable - yet for some, that cost represents a mortgage repayment, rent or few trips up to the shop.

For these people, this isn't a choice between making some retro-stance or 'having it all'. This is a purely financial decision to get the person who has statistically greater job security and opportunity to earn more (men) and get the other to stay at home and look after the children to reduce costs (women).

Margie Abbott, presumably in an affluent household with husband Tony, claims to have stopped work when she realised that after childcare costs, she had only "netted the princely sum of $20 a day".

The unsettling truth Miller and New York magazine refuse to acknowledge is that when wealthy families have a stay at home mother, it's considered a trend that marks "the death of (some form of) feminism"; but when a family near or below the average wage has a stay at home mother because they can't afford the costs involved, it doesn't get a cover article. Why? Because no one likes to admit when capitalism is failing, just when women are.

In fact, the whole 'retro wife' schtick falls apart spectacularly when you consider the barriers to women remaining in the workforce: the ever-increasing cost of childcare along with the gender pay gap, unequal division of work at home, and a glass ceiling that just won't crack.

In fact, Makino herself told the Atlantic that rather than embrace and rationalise her status as a retro wife, she quit her job due to the fact most of her income went on child-care. Attempts to balance work by going part-time were unsuccessful, often making demands when she was away from work. She moved on to another job, which ended when they moved. Amazing how none of this made it into the article.

Consider too that a variant of Miller's article was written some 10 years ago by Lisa Belkin for the New York Times. She too thought that women were "opting out" but now realises, ten years later, that in many cases they were "pushed".

None of what Miller reports on tackles core areas of inequality - the gender pay gap (the women who opted out earned less than their partners), current work culture (which is where the 8-hour-day movement went to die) or even childcare costs, which has the effect of excluding many women from participating in the workforce. Miller paraphrases Kelly Makino that "financial independence is not the only measure of success".

Perhaps financial independence is not the only measure of success but it's long been (and will continue to be) a very valuable measure of safety for women. When a woman is without financial independence, it is harder to leave and recover from an abusive relationship, it is harder to raise children (49.9 per cent of single mothers are considered to have "low economic resources"), and it is harder to prepare for the future (women statistically have lower superannuation coverage and balances than men).

So why was the article written in the first place? US blog Jezebel says that Miller may have been trying to respond to Facebook's chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg's recent book "Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead", which advocates women challenging cultural expectations and gender bias to become leaders. Basically, the exact opposite of what Miller is saying. Miller is even describing the 'trend' of retro wives as "Leaning Out" (a reaction against Sandberg's Lean In).

Miller's fetishising of a return to retro housewifery is not the bold new third step for women reacting against sexist traditionalism or 'having it all'. Yes, modern life is complex and there are unique demands that make us momentarily wish for a simpler life. Let's not forget that that 'simpler time' being sold was also a time where women were largely without rights in the workplace or home and where they had reduced education, health and financial outcomes (and, in some cases, still do).

Outside of excited editors and conservative religious communities, retro housewifery won't happen. Locating three women (two of whom claim to have been misrepresented) for an article does not constitute a national or global trend. It constitutes a new angle for a writer. To describe it as a bogus trend piece to bait feminism's detractors feels like a fair call in our days of conspicuous online outrage.

That people make individual choices for themselves is neither the death rattle for feminism nor cause for feminist validation. It's just a choice and whatever we choose isn't a feminist act, but the act of choosing and the explorations of what led to that choice can be. As Barnard president Debora Spar said in a recent panel discussion with Miller on CBS's This Morning, "There is no single feminist path they have to follow."

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